Blurred boundaries

Dance: Giselle — on love and other difficulties; Shaker

As the blurb at the back of the programme says, it is well known that ‘Dance Umbrella celebrates and champions contemporary dance’. Yet the notion of ‘contemporary’ dance, once an artistically neat classification, has long lost its transparency. The vibrant and provocative combination of diverse performing idioms, techniques and genres that characterises today’s dance has indeed contributed greatly to blurring the boundaries of an historically defined artistic genre. It is not surprising, therefore, that ballet, namely the arch-opposite of contemporary dance, took centre stage last week in one of the world’s most significant platforms of new dance-making. And the person responsible was Amanda Miller, a former acolyte of the post-modern ballet guru William Forsythe, with her Giselle — on love and other difficulties, the latest modern revisitation of the 1841 Romantic masterwork Giselle.

Miller is not the first to tackle the classical repertoire. What is known today as ‘choreographic revisionism’ started 25 years ago, when dance-makers such as Andy De Groat and Mats Ek first experimented with ballet monoliths such as Swan Lake and Giselle (both 1982). Modern, post-modern, contemporary and theatre-dance versions of the original classic are countless, and range from Gabriela Martinez’s stamina-shattering solo Giselle in Reno to the more recent and much acclaimed Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Irish drama-and-dance adaptation for his company Fabulous Beast.

Unlike the last named, and very much in line with Ek, Miller opts for a reading that follows the traditional division into two acts which are set to the ballet score, even though there are some cuts in the second part. Her intention is, allegedly, to explore and exploit her relationship with ballet tradition, while looking, with a contemporary eye, at the complex web of Romantic emotions and feelings that link one character to another in the ballet’s traditional plot.